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This is what we are talking about.

After watching Darren Kuropatwa’s #WhileWalking 66 posted by Amy Burvall in Google+, I started thinking about tags as a part of digital literacy. I am not a very good user of tags. I have been struggling with choosing consistent, clear tags since Delicious switched away from stacks.

“Blogging tips” websites indicate that you should do some research to find the most commonly used terms in your field. However, finding a list of keywords or tags for Educational Technology through a Google search is an exercise in futility since all sites include the word “tag”. Instead I did a very haphazard, non-academic search of tags people are using on their blogs to find the most common. Using Tagxedo, I found the top 100 tag words look like this (see below for how this image was made):

Since Tagxedo only uses individual words, the compound word tags are not shown, but this image does give an overview of what we are talking about. As I make my tags in the future, I will endeavour to use these words alone or in combination in addition to my own idiosyncrasies.

Out of curiosity, I fed the ETMOOC blog feed into Wordle and this is the image created. It will be interesting to see what will change as we move into Digital Literacy.

How I made the Tagxedo:

I thought that I would be able to see tags on other people’s blogs. This turns out to be more difficult than it sounds since many blogs do not list their tags. Visiting at least 100, I copied the tag lists from 33 blogs into a Word document. To choose the blogs, I started with the current postings (on Feb. 17, 2013) in the ETMOOC blog hub feed. Then I looked through all the blogs from James Dykstra’s (@mrpuffin) Twitter list of Canadian Educational Folk. I also added a few blogs from people I follow. Once I felt I had enough “data”, I copied the full Word document into Tagxedo. The application automatically choose the most frequently used words.